Relations of Authority

In the human sciences, since the seminal work of Max Weber, the concept of ‘authority’ has tended to languish compared to the adjacent and related concept of ‘power’. The one exception is the (Tavistock) Group Relations tradition where the concept of authority has been a central organising term in relation both to research based case studies and to the pedagogical device of the Group Relations Conference. The field of public policy and development studies also reflects this bias; indeed, the notion of ‘empowerment’, which originated in development practice, now has almost the status of an unquestioned ‘good’ within much of the literature of social policy and organisational studies. So it came as an interesting surprise to us when, as we immersed ourselves in a two-year research project1 on the role of development workers in disadvantaged communities in the UK, we started to find the concept of ‘authority’ emerging as a pivotal one in understanding the boundary role occupied by these workers funded by the state to ‘empower’ communities who were often in direct conflict with the state.

The research project examined how this group of public sector professionals - those engaged in the regeneration of impoverished communities - managed the ethical conflicts and dilemmas of their work. This involved interviewing a sample of thirty workers in two cities up to six times over a period of a year. The early interviews focused upon the workers' life histories, their values, and the personal capacities and resources that they felt they brought to the job. Later interviews tracked the way in which they dealt with conflicts and dilemmas in the work as they arose in real time. After completing the interviews,